Ahmadreza Ahmadi

Ahmadreza Ahmadi — poet, writer, playwright, and painter — was born in 1940 in Kerman,
Iran. His deep familiarity with classical Persian poetry and with the modernist poetry pioneered by Nima Yooshij helped him, in the 1960s, to found the New Wave school of contemporary Iranian poetry. By the latter half of the decade, the New Wave had become a major modernist movement in Iran, influencing literature, theater, cinema, and the visual arts. Ahmadi is also recognized as a pioneer of surrealism in Iranian children’s literature. In 1947, he moved to Tehran with his family, where he attended the prestigious Dar ul-Funun school. After finishing his studies, he served as a literacy corps teacher in a remote village in Kerman during his military service in 1966. In 1964, along with prominent figures such as Bahram Beyzai, Nader Ebrahimi, Esmaeil Nouri-Ala, Akbar Radi, and Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou, he co-founded the literary group Torfeh to promote and defend New Wave literature. The group published a literary journal and several books of poetry and prose. Ahmadi began working at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon) in 1970, serving as Director of Music Production until 1979 and later as an editor in the publishing division until his retirement in 1994. Among his achievements at Kanoon were the preservation and recording of classical Persian music, including early performances by Mohammad Reza Shajarian, as well as the archival recording and preservation of the voices of seminal poets such as Forough Farrokhzad, Ahmad Shamloo, and Nima Yooshij. In 1982, he married Shohreh Heydari, with whom he had a daughter, Mahoor. A prolific poet and writer, Ahmadi published 64 volumes of poetry, 58 children’s books of poems and stories, seven novels, as well as several plays and memoirs. In addition to performing his own poetry, he recorded and released recitations of works by Hafez, Khayyam, Nima Yooshij, and Sohrab Sepehri. He also appeared in several films, including The Postman (Postchi) (1972), directed by Dariush Mehrjui, and was the subject of three documentaries, notably The Good Time for Grief (2002) by Nasser Saffarian. After a prolonged period of serious heart illness, Ahmadi turned to painting in 2017 as another form of expression. Working primarily in watercolor and acrylic, he produced a body of abstract works
that resulted in two solo exhibitions (2018 and 2022) and several group shows. Over his
lifetime, Ahmadi received numerous awards, including the Bijan Jalali Prize (2006), Kanoon’s
Golden Pencil Award, recognition at the Journalists’ Poetry Prize (2008), a nomination for the
Hans Christian Andersen Award (2009), the Fajr Poetry Festival Book of the Year Award (2013),
a nomination for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2014), and the Children’s Book Council
Book of the Year Award. His writing is celebrated for its originality and inventive blend of
poetry and prose, and his work has been translated into many languages, including Arabic,
Armenian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Ahmadreza Ahmadi passed away in Tehran in 2023, at the age of 83.